What is the highest speed dial up modem (ie: 56k etc) that is available. Right now DSL and Cabel are out of the question where I live. Any alternatives would be nice to speed up my dial up connection; it's so slow I could make a grilled cheese waiting on it. ::

56k is the fastest you'll see. They did for a very short time make faster modems but they were very unpopular since it's futile to use them.

The modem isn't the slow part. It's the way dialup modems use the phone line. The line itself can't push more then that through. Out in the country a lot of phone lines max out at 28.8k.

So you can count yourself lucky if you actually manage to get 56k out of a 56k modem. Usually the connection is slower because of the lines. The only way to speed it up is to get some form of broadband.

Or well, actually, if you have a second phone line and two modems you can use both at the same time to double your speed by bridging the connections.

There are some isp's that offer accelerators for a couple bucks extra a month and they help some what but as Coco said the best you can get out of a 56k modem is 48k to 52k at least that is the best I got before going to cable.

Netcom used to give me 49.2 conection. prepaid internet ofcourse at the time speed would roughly be 4,5 steady sometimes 8.
Optusnet boradband = 64.95 australian = 10megabit and I have pulled 900+ kb/ps max Not too shabby for a cheap plan. 12 GB speed limit after to 28.8 puhhleaze by the time i download something as little as 5mb i can go for a 5km run ::

It is sort of possible with a 56k modem. But only because compression is used. So on larger text files or something easily compressable it actually sends the information compressed, but it doesn't tell you that. Instead it tells you the speed as those it was sending it uncompressed. Thus showing number higher then it can actually support.

Of course the compression doesn't work well for binary files, so it pretty much only makes a diffrence when transfer ascii files (plain text).

Ok, I checked and ISDN is available but the cost about 4 times more than what I'm paying. Although I do use my computer alot and I do alot on it, I just don't do enough to justify the cost. So I'm open to any solutions you guys can think of. I am going to check on multi link tho, and see, if available, what the cost is. Next question, what's the max memory one can put in a computer. My computer currently has a 256k, but I want to put as much as I can in it. Do I need to take apart and see how many slots are available? To be honest while I comfortable bringing the system down and tweaking a bit here or there, I've never actually opened the thing up. Any Advice?

Did you see my post above? I mean i made one or two typos but I explained it.

The actual speed does not in reality go to 8KB/sec. For example, you have a 100KB file. When it it being sent it will be compressed so that it's 50KB. Then it sends this.

Now rather then showing all of what happens to the user it instead reports a flase transfer speed. Like say it transfers the 100KB at 4KB/sec. Since it was compressed to 50KB (half). It would report the speed as 8KB/sec.

So in realiy you only are transfers at 4KB/sec. But it appears faster simply because compression was used, and it reports this simply by showing a faster speed. Of course these are just sample numbers, usually the compression will not be that much, and binary files won't be compressed at all in most cases.

Dial up modems have been using compression for a long time. If you want, google can provide tons of information on it without looking to hard.